


liberty or death

by ronsenboobi (snewvilliurs)



Series: arroway family adventures in eorzea 2: stormblood boogaloo [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Emotionally Repressed Ala Mhigans, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gladiators, Non-WoL Adventurer, Patch 3.5: The Far Edge of Fate Spoilers, Patch 4.0: Stormblood Spoilers, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-11-24 15:03:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20909603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snewvilliurs/pseuds/ronsenboobi
Summary: a story of past paths and the road to revolution, taking place immediately after the events of 3.5 at baelsar's wall and twenty years earlier, in the recent months since the fall of ala mhigo.The words were too sharp; they lingered like thorns on her tongue, so she attempted a bitter smile and presented him with the neck of the bottle in a silent offering. If Raubahn remembered her well enough, he had to know she was only abrasive because she no longer knew how to be anything else. "I never was all that pleasant back home, either, if I’m honest," she’d said to him once. "Some of us are just born bastards, I suppose. It’s only fitting that I had one of my own."





	1. after the wall

**Author's Note:**

> featuring morgana arroway, a member of the ala mhigan resistance and former gladiator; and her son, sairsel arroway, a half-elezen ranger. morgana's brother, gotwin, and his family belong to my friend sammish.

When the smoke cleared, Morgana was alone.  


Alliance soldiers swarmed the Wall under orders to ‘secure’ the castrum—some magitek stragglers and little else, after the Griffin’s stunt, but the arrogance had to be expected of the Grand Companies. The survivors from the Resistance were so few that their involvement may have seemed like a particularly vicious nightmare, if not for the bodies of her comrades lying dead everywhere she looked. Her whole unit decimated; dozens of friends fallen not upon imperial swords, but the mad plans of one of their own.

She would have spat on Ilberd Feare’s corpse, if not for the cowardice of such an act when she had not taken his life herself; if not for the fact that there was nothing of him left in the primal’s wake. She would have done a lot of things, if she’d had enough sense to be angry.

Rage was easy; rage had kept her warm all these years when her belly was filled only by gnawing hunger that dragged an unshakeable chill into her bones. But everything around her was senseless, and there was none of it in her mind and in her heart, either. Sense would have taken her back to Little Ala Mhigo, back to what remained of the Resistance on their side of the Wall—and thinking of the wrong side as _theirs_ made her want to choke on the very word—while the Alliance took hold of the castrum. The only thing that had made sense for the last twenty years was acting for the Resistance, for Ala Mhigo; to survive long enough that she may see her homeland freed, and give her life when it mattered if she must.

Now, she could hardly even conceive of leaving the castrum at all; there was no clarity in her mind.

Her son was nowhere to be found.

She’d sent him off, naïve and barely trained, to face a man twice his years—a madman and a fanatic, but a man with more skill than any boy could have ever worked up from almost nothing in a matter of moons. She’d sent him off as an ally, but would that have mattered, to the Griffin? All those who had followed him were lambs for a slaughter, wood on a pyre. If Sairsel was gone, then—

She couldn’t bear the thought of it. The Griffin cutting him down, the primal consuming his body until he was nothing but one voice lost in a current of prayers and dying cries. Every waking hour, her mind worked up some new version of the horrors; every night that passed buried the knowledge, deep into her bones, that she had brought this on him. 

_Anything,_ she’d said, and twenty years of rage had made her believe it. Morgana would have done most anything, for Ala Mhigo, but not this. Not giving her son’s life away like it was some cheap coin—and certainly not to summon a primal. She should have seen through Ilberd; she should have seen through the mask of familiarity and recognition in the losses they shared and found how far beyond the realm of the acceptable his plans lay, but she’d been blind, and Sairsel…

She could not let him go. The Alliance settled in around her, making a proper occupation of the castrum, and every day Morgana joined the soldiers on the Wall who gathered the bodies, sifting through familiar faces and those of strangers looking for her son’s. Every day she asked the soldiers who shared this duty with her if they had found him. 

_My boy. My only boy._

As those days passed, she no longer knew what she could stomach. Would it be better, to find his body as she had found Gotwin’s—something cold and still over which to weep? Or should she be made to mourn him, halfway between grief and the foolish hope that he might have lived, as she had mourned Mathias and Havisa and every last person she had left behind in Ala Mhigo?

Even as the castrum was cleared, she never found an answer. It left her feeling as empty as those corpses, walking as though between worlds. _I have survived everything that tried to kill me,_ she thought when the realm of the living pulled at her. _I will survive this, too._

Would Sairsel want her to survive him? 

Not even that found an answer in her mind, and it was the emptiness that cut deepest. She did not know what he wanted, what he believed. She barely even knew who he was.

So she lived, for the time being. She hadn’t been able to step outside of the castrum and into East End, not on her own—she could not set foot on Gyr Abanian soil again with no one by her side, not when she had left it with the family she was running to protect. But she looked at it. She sat at the edge of the wall with a bottle in her hand and she watched the sun kiss the mountain peaks and she waited for something that she knew could not come.

Most of the Resistance survivors worked below, deployed to make contact with their brothers and sisters in Rhalgr’s Reach, and the Alliance soldiers rarely spoke to her. Likely a number of them thought her mad. The heavy footfalls on the metal were of no concern to her; they always passed.

But not these. They came near, and they slowed, and they stopped. A silent presence, undeniable. And then her name, spoken in a voice deeper and rougher than she remembered—worn by twenty years and all the hardships that came with them. Her own voice had suffered the same.

“Morgana.”

She turned her head—not fully, her chin only brushing her shoulder, but she hardly needed more. There were too few men like him that she could not recognize even a glimpse of him: the Bull of Ala Mhigo, as fierce and proud as he had been on the bloodsands. His skin bronze in the waning daylight behind him, brighter than in the lights of the arena. He was stronger, wearing more scars, and Morgana was the same; they had both always been the same, and somehow, twenty years had not changed that.

The irony of the same man having taken so much from the both of them was not lost on her, even before she opened her mouth to speak to him.

“Been a while,” she said, sand scraping against her throat. “Have you come to arrest me, General?”

Raubahn took a careful step closer, then another. When Morgana didn’t stiffen or pull a knife on him, he lowered himself to sit beside her. “Not today.”

“You didn’t have to wait until we were both in the Shroud to pay a social call. Little Ala Mhigo was just next door; your little Ul’dahn soldiers knew the way well enough.”

The words were too sharp; they lingered like thorns on her tongue, so she attempted a bitter smile and presented him with the neck of the bottle in a silent offering. If Raubahn remembered her well enough, he had to know she was only abrasive because she no longer knew how to be anything else. _I never was all that pleasant back home, either, if I’m honest,_ she’d said to him once. _Some of us are just born bastards, I suppose. It’s only fitting that I had one of my own._

“I’ve been told you were looking for your son.”

“A fool’s errand; he was primal fodder. I need to accept it.”

“He may yet live,” Raubahn said. Morgana didn’t know whether it was a platitude, or something he truly believed. Both seemed unlike him. “He would not be the first to survive being thought dead.”

“And who would that predecessor be? Ilberd?” she asked, snorting derisively.

“So you knew him.”

“Aye, I knew him. Threw in my lot with him.” She shook her head. “I’ve always been a shite gambler.”

Raubahn smiled, melancholy and reserved, as he lifted the bottle to his lips and drank. “I still have never seen anyone lose at dice as many times as I have you.”

“I’m sorry to report it hasn’t gotten better.” Morgana sniffed, drawing her eyes across the rising peaks on the horizon. “I’m still not certain what it is I said that made him take off that mask, but he did. Told me his name and what he’d done. He asked me if I cared, and I said no; I told him it wasn’t turning against a brother when he turned against you.”

To that, Raubahn said nothing, and Morgana did not search his face for the unspoken. The mountains were silent, too, but they did not see her the way he did.

“And now, where do I stand? On the graves of all the brothers and sisters he betrayed, my son among them.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I think I do. The last thing I told him was to go to the bastard. Why else wouldn’t he be here, if not for Ilberd personally making a sacrifice of him? I _ordered_ him—” she repeated, and her voice shook and died in her throat. She snatched the bottle from Raubahn’s hand, drank, and steadied herself, grasping onto bitterness in lieu of sorrow.

That was easier. She watched the mountains still as she poured a few sips’ worth of the alcohol over the edge of the platform, toasting no one.

“It is never easy to command one’s own child in battle,” Raubahn said. “But we give the orders that we think we must, and they fight with their own strength.”

“Right—you have a son, now, too,” Morgana said, mustering half of a smile. It was worth very little.

“I do. Pipin. I came into his life late, but…”

Morgana shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. I bore mine in my own womb and you’ve spent more of your life with yours than I did.”

“You didn’t go back to him? After the Coliseum?”

“I couldn’t. When they killed Gotwin, I—I was sure they’d come for me. I couldn’t lead them back to him. And after that, in the Resistance… I saw no point in going back to a child who would be without a mother either way,” she said slowly. That wasn’t the whole of it; she’d done it for herself, too, because leaving him the first time had been so painful she couldn’t bear repeating it. After a time, it simply became easier to be alone, leaving him to a better life than she could have given him.

“Did I ever tell you his name?”

“No,” Raubahn said, keeping his voice gentle.

“Sairsel. His father named him,” she said, wishing that he’d only ever needed this name, and not hers. It might have saved him from being led back to her. “Sairsel Arroway.”

“A good name.”

Morgana could bear to say nothing else, and Raubahn did not dare. He had to know she’d hate it, but he was still gentle and careful in the way he raised his hand to rest upon her shoulder. For as long as his touch remained, she thought of blindly reaching up and taking it, even if she couldn’t even look at him; her hands were heavy in her lap, gripping the bottle so tightly she thought she might break it. Her chest shook from the sobs that she wouldn’t allow to take breath.

Ever so slowly, she shifted towards him, like a quiet tide creeping towards the shore. She drew closer until her knee was against his and she could bury her face in his neck, a fist curling at his thigh. She did not weep, but she shook with sorrow and with rage and with shame, and he moved his hand to her back and said nothing.


	2. after the fall

“They don’t like us,” said Gotwin.

“Of course they don’t like us,” Morgana replied without looking up from her sword. She swept the whetstone one last time across the blade, blew, and lifted it up. “These gladiators, they’re just show chocobos, and they know it. Their whole purpose is just to fight and die on the bloodsands, and we show up, and we know real battle. Makes them look bad.”

Ul’dahns had been content enough to accept Ala Mhigan refugees within their borders, at first; the coin-lords saw profit to be made on their backs through cheap labour and desperate trade, but the veneer was beginning to wear thin for everyone else not benefitting as the moons turned. The gladiators themselves were, for the most part, most certainly not benefitting from the Ala Mhigans stealing their victories without, as Morgana had heard one of them put it, ‘paying their dues in training.’

She’d almost knocked his teeth out. Had they not paid their dues fighting for their lives when soldiers and magitek flooded their streets, looking to cut down any caught fleeing or resisting the Empire? Had they not paid their dues rising up against a mad king who had already spilled too much blood? Gotwin and Morgana had been raised with swords in their hands. They had paid their dues a hundred, a thousand times over.

“And maybe that sort of talk isn’t helping us all that much,” Gotwin said, his nonchalant irony making Morgana roll her eyes.

“You here to make friends, then? Because I’m not.”

“Not at this rate.” Gotwin threw a cursory look around the training grounds as he stretched, motioning with his head towards the man across the field who seemed hells-bent on decimating the striking dummy making a pitiful stand before him. “What about him, you think?”

“What, the Bull? Doesn’t look like the sort who likes anyone. And they like him even less than they do us.”

Morgana shrugged as she stood, rolling her wrist to spin her sword once. As far as she was concerned, the one they called the Bull of Ala Mhigo had a few damned good reasons to have that air about him. The first being that he was Ala Mhigan; that would be enough on its own, and Morgana figured that she would be just as wild and angry if not for the family that kept her sane. The Bull’s second good reason was that he’d been dragged to the Coliseum in chains to be executed upon the bloodsands—and lived long enough to free himself, but freedom was a strange thing to have without a home.

It was comforting, Morgana supposed, to know that at the very least, she and Gotwin had come to risk their lives on those sands by choice.

She bent to retrieve her shield and tapped the flat of her sword against it, catching Gotwin’s attention. Her body settled into the ease of a battle stance. “Come on, you lazy sod. You can make doe eyes at the Bull after we survive our next bout, and maybe I won’t steal your wife.”

*******

Gotwin was ill.

With a healer for a wife, it meant his life was in no danger, but Havisa had a will of steel, and no amount of miserable begging on his part could convince her to force his body to bring itself back together enough that he could step onto the bloodsands. It also meant that Morgana was to be alone in the arena that night, and that the First Sword of the gladiator’s guild had a scowl on his face.

“I’m going to have half this town up my arse, Arroway,” he said, rubbing at his forehead. His attention was half on her, half on the bright-haired girl—no older than seven summers, by Morgana’s estimate—working on her form two feet away. Mostly on the girl. “Mylla, Thal’s balls, your stance is too narrow. I’ve told you a hundred times.”

“Her stance is just fine.” Morgana made a fist below her navel. “Women have lower root centers. She won’t be balanced right if she widens it,” she said, then put both hands on her hips. “Your arse is going to be fine.”

“You Ala Mhigans don’t understand how I make money. What do you think all these fine people will think, when I announce the Griffin’s Talons and give them a fucking one-legged chicken?”

“I’d say it’s going to be very hard for them to understand a word of your announcing because the little chicken ripped out your tongue,” Morgana said flatly. She clucked for good measure, holding his gaze with a withering stare.

He closed his eyes with a sigh. “Twelve, woman. Do you ever make anything easy?”

“No, man.”

“I’ve a bout set up for a pair and only one fighter. You can count far enough to understand my issue, yes?”

It was Morgana’s turn to sigh, a long and measured exhale. “My brother will fight when he’s well enough, and not a moment before. It isn’t like I’ve come to beg you to pay him regardless of his presence—I’m _informing_ you that I’m here, and he’s not, and I trust your clever sense for profit to make this work like you would with anyone else.”

The guildmaster leveled a cynically tortured expression at her, but Morgana maintained her refusal to offer any semblance of sympathy for a man who made a living training men and women to die in an arena. There was honour in the training of warriors, and no Ala Mhigan would dispute that—and Morgana was under no illusion that she held any moral ground as a gladiator—but she was growing weary of the manner with which he always seemed to want to make it into some sort of great plight.

His gaze drifted to the girl as his mind worked. Morgana snapped her fingers in front of his face.

“I’ve got as much claws on my own as I do with Gotwin. You’ll have a show whether he’s here or not.”

“Aye,” the guildmaster said, a solution forming in his mind. “And gil will flow.”

When Morgana saw the bout rosters an hour later, she swore, but he wasn’t anywhere to be found to hear her complaints. Another hour later, she stood inside the tunnels with the crowd roaring beyond the gate at a skinny Miqo’te in a desperate bout with a coeurl. In the tunnels on the other end of the arena, five prisoners with crude weapons awaited the battle that would cost them their lives, hoping for freedom in the blood of their would-be executioners.

She could have been their sole executioner, and it wouldn’t have made a difference, but the guildmaster—and the coin-lords who sank their gil into the Coliseum, and the people who gambled for a piece of their fortune—had wanted his show.

The Bull of Ala Mhigo stood beside her, silent as a monument.

“Is there anything I should know?” Morgana asked as the Miqo’te avoided a sweep of the coeurl’s claws with a somersault where his hands did not even touch the ground. “Or would you rather keep all your old injuries and blind spots to yourself so that I don’t know your weaknesses if we ever have to face each other in there?”

“I can already tell you yours. I’ll cover them.”

She snorted. “Is that so?”

“You can’t turn your head fully to the left; your brother compensates by staying near your flank. He’s left-handed, so you favour back-handed—and underhand—strikes more than the average warrior. It makes you unpredictable, but your momentum tends to be more rooted than mobile.”

Morgana didn’t know whether she was irritated or impressed; her meager smirk seemed to be reaching for the latter.

“All right, so the quiet one is good at watching.”

“I rely overmuch on charges, you might have noticed from the name,” he said, a tinge of self-derision to his voice. “It is a gamble; I’m left open as I recover. My heavy strikes are slower. Also, I took a Garlean arrow to the knee on the Ilsabard border,” he said, tapping his right leg. “I still can’t pivot quite well enough.”

“You might pivot better if you didn’t rely on kicking anything and anyone that gets close,” Morgana said, her mood alleviating.

“So you do watch, too.”

“I see. There’s a difference.”

Rather than countering the statement with a request for clarification, the Bull nodded as though she made a fair point. He moved a hand, palm face-up, in front of Morgana. “Raubahn.”

His hand was far larger than hers, but Morgana always kept her grip heavy. When they shook, it was as equals. Out in the arena, the coeurl fell limp, and the Miqo’te dropped to his knees with the relief as the crowd cheered for him.

“Morgana.”

The gates opened, and the light swept in. The Bull and the Talons of Ala Mhigo stepped onto the sands as equals, and left the arena bloodied—and as comrades.

*******

“How did it go?” Gotwin asked, propping himself up in bed with some degree of misery. Two summers ago—perhaps even less—Morgana would have joked and called it his deathbed, but now, the words seemed violently out of place.

“Well, as you can see, I’m still standing with all my limbs and all my innards where they should be.”

Gotwin managed a pitiful little smirk. If he’d voiced his concerns, it would have earned him Morgana’s ire, but she knew as well as he did that sending her off to fight on her own when they always fought at each other’s side had worried him. He didn’t have to speak to show his relief; placatingly, Morgana gave his cheek a pat, and that was that.

“I know you’re just fine; if I still haven’t figured out how to kill you, no one else will,” he said. “I meant the bout.”

“There’s not much to be said of it. Our wise and respectable master wouldn’t let me fight it on my own, so I didn’t,” Morgana said, giving a resigned shrug. “The other one didn’t die, so maybe he’s just going to replace you, now.”

Gotwin wrinkled his nose; Morgana thought that he was about to sneeze and took a gratuitous step back. “Who’d he saddle you with? He better not have used the Griffin name on an Ul’dahn, that slimy—”

“Don’t get yourself all worked up; Havisa is going to skin me alive. It’s fine. I was the Griffin’s Talons on my own. Our good friend the Bull of Ala Mhigo already has a good enough name for himself.”

“The Bull?” Gotwin said, raising his eyebrows. “I suppose it makes sense. How does he measure as a partner?”

“The man’s seen his fair share of battles, that’s for certain. Mhigan through and through. I was surprised; he’s watched us fight enough that he knew where to stand with me. Crowd seemed to like it.”

Gotwin nodded. Before he could manage even one other word, Havisa appeared behind Morgana as though she’d stood there the entire time. “It is far too late for you to be up chatting,” she said, pointing a threatening finger at her husband. “And you should know better than to encourage him.”

“He looks like the very image of health. Only slightly green,” Morgana said, almost at the same time as her brother spoke.

“I’ve been confined to this bed and to sleep all day, my love. Surely—”

Havisa’s tone cut without mercy. “Surely you can yet rest through the night.”

“Tomorrow,” Morgana assured Gotwin, relenting. “I can tell you both about the match then.” Around Havisa, she softened; her smile was easy as she glanced down at her, pressing an affectionate kiss to her sister-in-law’s cheek and drifting towards the doorway. “Do as your wife says and get better, Gotwin, or I’ll end up getting paired with a bull for the rest of my fighting days.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: this chapter contains explicit sexual content. 18+ only! if you'd rather skip the graphic stuff, you can tab out after the kissing starts, about two thirds of the way through the chapter.

Morgana had spent too long in the woods; every night in Ul’dah made that abundantly clear. The way the stones drank the warmth of the sun to carry it through the cold desert night choked her, and the starry sky above appeared only to be a patch of something that she knew to be greater, endless—and there was irony in that. Under a canopy of trees, the Shroud only lived up to its name, the sky veiled by branches and leaves as far as the eye could see; how could it ever compare to the endless expanse that arced over the Gyr Abanian mountains from one side of the horizon to the other?

Thanalan was more open than the forest could ever be, but she still felt trapped. Through the worst nights, a voice inside Morgana urged her desperately to go, to leave, to _move,_ even if no part of her knew where. She had enough of running; her family had enough of running. There was nowhere else she could—not should—be, and she laboured to write those words into every fibre of her being.

The nights laboured to erase them: they swept over those certainties as though she had traced letters in sand, and replaced them with the voice of a babe. How many times since parting with him had she been woken by her own imaginings of Sairsel’s fragile whimpers? They had no place here, but she still found herself, far too often, on her feet in the darkness of her cell before she was even fully awake—only then realizing, as her skin touched the cold stone, that the voice she heard only screamed within the confines of her own mind.

She ached for him, for those searching eyes, for his tiny little mouth and his primly pointed ears. She missed the smiles that he had begun to form. Being without him was an emptiness worse than even the losses that sundered her time and again since the fall of Ala Mhigo, a weakness she’d never known to endure; how could she have? Most of her life, she’d scarcely ever imagined herself as a mother, and even less so a mother without a home whose son belonged neither quite in the Wood or at all in Ul’dah.

The emptiness, she usually shook away through keeping awake under that night sky, with a sword in hand as though it might serve to slice her a larger few patches of black velvet and shining stars. A practice sword, but a sword nonetheless.

As she crossed over from the gladiator barracks to the training grounds, Morgana found that she was not the only one to have had the idea: the rhythm of repeated strikes against a striking post echoed through the night’s silence long before she was even inside the practice arena. Hesitation bound her for two faltering footsteps—she had no particular desire to share the space with an Ul’dahn from whom she kept as much distance as they did from her—but she pressed forward, more desperate to wear herself to sleep than she was for complete solitude.

It should have come as no surprise that it was her countryman, rather than any other gladiator, going about thrashing the striking post. Morgana could have pretended that it was exceptional Ala Mhigan discipline, that it did not go as deep as it did—but she knew better than that. Not one of his moves took shape in the manner of real training; there was no pursuit of betterment in the way he unleashed his ferocity upon the post. A man who trained was sharp, focused. He was lost in it.

Morgana watched him for ten moves. At first, she studied his stance: narrower than when he truly fought, his torso angled nearer to the post than it needed to be. In a real bout, an opponent might exploit the change in his balance, use his momentum to topple him over—but this served him to unleash the full weight of his titanic frame, and the striking post shook in its foundations from every blow. Despite the chill that fell over the city at night, he’d elected to train bare-footed and shirtless; the low torchlight turned his sweat-slick skin to gleaming bronze, shadows shifting across the lines and curves of his muscles. As the tenth blow fell, she regarded the tense set of his jaw, the stiffness in his grip, and decided to step forward.

“You fight two bouts in one evening and it still isn’t enough to sate your appetite?” she asked, leaning against a pillar and crossing her arms over her chest. “Rhalgr himself couldn’t find a more eager pupil.”

Raubahn met her lofty tone with an exhale that could have been a scoff as much as a sigh, glancing fleetingly at her—down, up, away—before directing his attention back onto the striking post. “I do not sleep,” he said, his voice clipped by the effort of his next blow. “Not as long as there is any fight left in me.”

The weight of the unspoken weaved between his words could have choked a man. Morgana understood, and he knew without looking—without _knowing_ her outside of the intimacies of shared battle—that she did. Those truths hung in the air, silent but for the thunderous rumble of his blows.

“It’s a marvel you haven’t exhausted yourself into an early grave.”

He grunted, spinning on his heel to deliver a backhanded strike. “Early, timely; I no longer know.”

“Don’t wonder. It’s a waste of energy better spent on surviving.”

“And you?” Raubahn asked, finally falling still. “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” Morgana said. She pushed herself off of the pillar, crossed the length of the arena until she was standing with a hand against the striking post he was abusing, eyes steady on him. “So maybe you could wear yourself down on something that will actually hit back.”

Raubahn considered her, his gaze trailing down again; this time, it caught on the pink scars at her throat, and there was something strangely disarming in that. She preferred the brief new flashes of interest that he now allowed himself, looking away before crossing the border into impropriety.

“Fists or swords?”

Morgana smirked and turned on her heel, going to a basket full of training staves and tossing Raubahn one. “The Mhigan way,” she said as she took up a staff of her own. She spun it in one hand, tossed it to the other, and clasped both hands around it behind her back to stretch. “It’s how my mother taught me to fight.”

“See, I learned with pitchforks. One of my friends did not have very good aim,” Raubahn said, pointing to three small, puckered scars just above his hip bone. Morgana grimaced. “It was real swords and the military after that.”

They both gravitated towards the center of the training grounds, walking onto the square: a mat fashioned with supple leather and filled with enough straw to feed every chocobo in Ul’dah upon which the gladiators fought and wrestled, replicating the unsteady ground of the bloodsands without the mess. Morgana angled her body away from Raubahn’s and widened her stance, knees bent, whipping out the staff at her side in a perfect line that followed the length of her arm. She said nothing else to him; battle spoke more clearly than any of her skill with words ever could.

“Let’s dance, then,” Raubahn said as he fell into his own battle stance.

It had nothing of a dance, even before the first strike: they circled each other as predators might a prey, and grace was forgotten when Raubahn charged forward. 

His staff cracked against Morgana’s as she blocked with both hands, the force of the blow reverberating through her arms like coursing lightning. She pushed back against him and snapped her right hand up to strike the side of his jaw with the end of her staff. Startling, but not meant to injure; it was only enough to make Raubahn shake his head, blinking against the surprise. Morgana smirked, but the Bull of Ala Mhigo was not stunned for long.

What ground she’d gained on him, negating the advantage of his reach, he took in driving her back with three heavy thrusts. She parried the first two, and the third struck her shoulder with a burst of pain. A few strides were enough for him to push her nearer to the edge of the mat, but her back heel was firm against it, and his next move was familiar: the gamble of a charge, the sheer mass of him a weakness as much as it was a strength. It could have sent Morgana stumbling out of the square, but she bent at the waist to dodge and snapped her staff across his back, twirling away as he grunted.

Her breath rose quicker in her lungs, the thrill singing in her veins. They traded harsh blows, more evenly matched than she’d expected, both blocking and parrying and striking back with such efficiency that the clapping of staff against staff echoed in an erratic rhythm through the arena like a fall of rain. Pushing in, pulling back; driving each other away only to come charging back in.

Morgana had Raubahn down on one knee after a series of quick thrusts that allowed her to get close and rob him of his balance when he tried to kick her back. His staff rose to block her two-handed cleave, and he jabbed a fist into her gut, knocking the wind out of her lungs. Precious seconds flew from her hands as her shoulders drew in, even as she did her best to mitigate her body’s instinct to curl in on herself; she tightened her core expecting another punch that didn’t come. Instead, Raubahn knocked her staff up and away from his, then swept it under her feet.

She landed on her left shoulder with a groan, breathing hard. Raubahn was back on his feet; his towering frame moved towards her, but his staff did not meet Morgana’s throat yet. Curling in on herself, legs swinging, she rolled away and got up on her feet in a low stance, one steady leg extended for balance. When Raubahn made to strike her again, she shot up to stand and snapped away his staff, bearing down—he blocked—then spinning away with a flourish to deliver a backhanded blow, her body sideways, arm extended—

It didn’t land. Raubahn was closer than she’d judged, and he caught her arm under his left, pinning her by the sheer force of his body. Morgana felt the proximity of bare skin on skin like the crack of a whip, or that coursing lightning, looking up into his face as she tried to wrench herself free. He had her firmly trapped, her grip tight on her staff but useless; she panted and watched his parted lips, felt the rise and fall of his chest against her.

Perhaps he expected her to surrender then. He raised his staff, aiming for her throat, but Morgana raised her empty left hand to catch his wrist, fingers as hard as claws. She held firm even as he pushed against it.

“Did you think you had me?” she asked.

“I have you,” Raubahn said, low in his chest. His gaze moved down to her mouth, too, and for a moment it seemed like he might say something else.

Morgana had no intention of turning this into a conversation. She tipped her chin up and her head back—carefully measuring the angle, prudent enough to remember that this was only a spar—and smashed her forehead into Raubahn’s nose. This time, he didn’t just grunt; he swore.

He might have stumbled back, if not for how closely they were locked together, but his grip faltered, and that was enough. Morgana ripped his staff from his hand and her own arm back from his hold, moving away from him and tapping the two staves together with a smug, satisfied look. The rush coursed along her spine as Raubahn stared at her, a hand covering his nose, and smirked in astonished delight.

“Bleeding?” Morgana asked.

Raubahn sniffed, wiping his knuckles underneath his nose and glancing down at his hand. “No.”

“Probably not broken, then,” Morgana said, nodding her head to one side. Her time in the Coliseum was turning her into more of a performer than she’d ever been: she twirled both staves in her hands, sweeping one arm up around her head while the other curled around her torso, and fell into a low stance with both staves poised like twin swords after one last spin. “I’m not done with you yet.”

Pleasantly resigned, Raubahn readied himself with his fingers curled into loose fists and, this time, waited for Morgana’s first move.

She had no intention of fighting him with both staves—they were far too long for dual wielding without some degree of encumbrance, and putting him at a disadvantage could only end up boring her—but she delighted in seeing him take a defensive position. He displayed surprising agility, for a man his size: he met the new onslaught of her blows with quick, careful dodges, bending back and deflecting Morgana’s staff with the palm of his hand. His breath came sharp when she struck his side, muscles tensing.

It was a good show, for a matter of seconds, but Morgana found that she wanted to fight him up close again. She tossed his staff up with another spin, caught it in her sword hand, and discarded both staves together off the side of the mat.

They shared a grin—sharp and wild—and met each other with hard, unforgiving blows. Morgana punched and kicked, avoiding a jab at her flank at the cost of taking a hit against her chin that snapped her head back. The surprise destabilized her, and she was forced to crouch to avoid a sweep of Raubahn’s arm meant to grapple her. She sidestepped, moving in a sharp line towards his back, and kicked the side of her foot to the back of his knee.

He didn’t even bend long enough to touch the mat, but it was enough, lowering him closer to Morgana’s own height: she wrapped an arm around his neck to keep him in a tight headlock against the side of her chest. It forced him to bend forward, one arm falling around her waist to try and grab her elbow and break the hold, his other hand closing around her wrist—Morgana was relentless.

“Thinking of surrendering yet?” she asked breathlessly, a smirk growing on her lips. “Or shall I put you to sleep?”

Raubahn growled without anger, the rumble of his voice spreading through Morgana’s arm. Her legs were beginning to tire and shake from keeping herself so firmly grounded, but she held firm against his thrashing—pointless, she thought, and then everything escaped her as she felt the stunning blow of his fist against her head. It was little more than a tap, far from the ferocity with which he might strike in a fight to the death, but her hold weakened on him, and he was quick to seize the advantage.

Before Morgana could act, Raubahn pressed himself against her back and seized her in a stranglehold, strong arm tight against her throat as he lifted the other hand to the back of her head, locking her tight. Morgana struggled, at first, thrashing as he had against her, hands grasping his forearm. She elbowed blindly, meeting only hard muscle, as her lungs burned and her breath came less and less.

All she had to do was tap his arm, she knew, lift two fingers in his eyeline to show her surrender, but bowing to her own obstinacy was something she still hadn’t learned to do. Her fingers tightened against Raubahn’s arms, and she did all she could to shift her balance and throw him to the ground. His feet barely even shifted on the mat.

Morgana dropped to one knee, then the other; Raubahn followed her, lowering himself—she felt his stance shift, his feet widen behind her. Was he in reach? She let her hands fall from his arm, and breath returned to her by an inch as he loosened his grip for an instant, thinking her defeated.

She could move, if barely. Blindly, she reached a hand back, fingers meeting Raubahn’s ankle: opportunity. All at once, Morgana shifted all her weight to the side, pushing back against him, and moved her shoulder behind Raubahn’s leg. She wrapped an arm around it and _pulled._

The beginning of his fall tugged her back, but he let go before slamming down onto the mat. Morgana twisted and took hold of his leg, lifting his lower body, smiling even as she took desperate, gasping gulps of air. His back arching up, Raubahn tapped his hand twice on the mat, and Morgana relented. He stared at her as he lay still on his back, breathless, and she burned.

Not for the fight. She thought she ached for more of it, more of that thrill, more of this exchange, but she realized as she stared at his mouth that it was more of _him_ that she wanted, the warm and hard press of his body. It didn’t have to feel like a war—not against him, not with herself.

She had been fighting for so long that she no longer knew how else to be, but she tired of it. So she chose not to fight; not this time. She moved before she could hesitate—from where she knelt on the ground by Raubahn’s feet, she drew nearer, swinging a leg up over him to straddle his hips, and leaned down to crush her mouth against his.

Raubahn lay stunned for one heartbeat too long, as though he’d had his head smashed into something far harder than the mat; Morgana was moments from surrendering and pulling away when he tangled his fingers in her hair, his hand a steady weight against the back of her head. In this, they both cultivated little grace, too—too weary to delve into the art of it, too fiercely animated by the thrill of battle. Morgana was harsher in her kisses than she was in a friendly bout of sparring, and Raubahn matched her ferocity in a way no one else had.

They met in the bruising of that kiss as sharply as their staves had. Morgana slid her tongue against Raubahn’s as though she could still taste the fight on him, fire spreading down her throat even as she breathed through her nose. When she pulled back, her breath nearly hissed.

“All right?” Raubahn asked, concern flashing over his face as he propped himself up on an elbow to lift a hand to her neck. For all his strength, the touch of his fingers was delicate against her throat, not daring to brush against her scars. “Did I go too far?”

Morgana smiled, sharp-edged. “I’m fine. Don’t patronize me.”

She laid her hand over Raubahn’s, then slid it over his wrist, grazing the taut skin of his forearm with blunt nails. He shivered; his fingers trailed down the expanse of her neck, down the hollow of her throat, down her chest. His grey gaze burned hot on her—every inch of skin, of muscle, of the shadows falling over her scars—and she found that, for once, she delighted in the flames.

When she kissed him again, there was no surprise: he met her lips open-mouthed, breathless and wanting. Her hands ran down his bare chest; his slid up under the thin fabric of her tunic, thumb running along the bottom of her ribcage. Finally, Morgana shivered, too.

Raubahn pulled back to look at her again, meeting her eyes before letting his gaze fall, unreserved in its trajectory and its hunger. He kissed her neck, and Morgana almost expected him to bite, to at least graze his teeth—that would come later—when his lips parted, soft and warm alongside the scratching of his stubble.

She rocked her hips down against his—and, Twelve, she could feel him, almost as well as her own arousal, slick and hot between her parted thighs. Her fingers, bent like claws, slid ever down Raubahn’s chest as she rolled her hips and drew a moan from him, rumbling low in his chest and against her neck. One of his hands fell to her thigh, holding her as an anchor, and Morgana decided that she’d had quite enough of the fleeting touches. How did he seem to know so well how to make her want?

When she shoved his shoulder down onto the mat, it was almost as though they were yet fighting, but Raubahn did not resist it. He kept on touching her, hands roaming torturously, eyes watching her as she moved. Morgana sank her teeth into her bottom lip to keep herself from keening as he pressed a thumb between her legs, tugged at the laces of her trousers so roughly she half expected to snap them, and shifted her weight forward on her knees. Courteously, Raubahn helped her push the fabric down as far as it would go while she unlaced his trousers.

He stroked his thumb against her while she wrapped her fingers around his cock and pulled it free, her breath fluttering in her belly. And, gods—he almost smiled when she swatted his hand away, head bowed, one hand coming to steady herself against his chest.

“I won,” Morgana breathed, rocking her hips down and along his length, still held in her hand. It made him heave a shuddering breath. “I get to have you how I want.”

Raubahn’s eyes briefly moved to the sky, letting out a sharp sigh, before his mind could grasp at the words again. His voice was low and rocky with want. “Is that how it works, then?”

He tried to push himself up again, and she kept a heavy hand on his shoulder, keeping him against the mat. The same unspoken rules had carried over from their spar: he had only tap against her arm, against the mat, and she would end it. But he didn’t. He only drank her in as she spoke. 

“Tonight, it does.”

Morgana held Raubahn’s gaze as she moved a hand down between her legs and pressed two fingers inside herself, only dipping in—though she stole one greedy second of pleasure in curling her fingers up. Her fingers came away slick, even more so than she thought. And she was glad for it; she wanted to waste no more time. 

Morgana took him in her hand again, flicking her wrist for two slow strokes that spread her wetness from her fingers. Raubahn’s fluttering breaths made his chest shift under her other palm; she spread her fingers wide over the hard planes of muscle as she leaned forward onto her knees and guided him inside her and lowered herself onto him, ignoring the shaking of her thighs. Her fingers curled in against his skin. 

After how their fight had ended, Morgana’s breath still burned on its way through her throat. The rest of her was afire, too, with her muscles trembling and her skin burning everywhere Raubahn touched, even in the cool night air. And she ached with want, ached from the fullness and the pressure and the pleasure, and her mind spun as she took in all of him. It stopped her thinking; there was only Raubahn, strong and hot and just as lost as she was, and the same urgency with which they had fought. She didn’t need to catch her breath. She only needed to move.

One of Raubahn’s hands slid up her torso as she began to rock her hips, trailing over the now-fading white lines on her belly, feather-light along her ribs, and up to cup her breast. Morgana pressed her own hand over his, fingers tight, and sighed as she bowed her head. He breathed hard, too—quiet, at first, thrusting up shallowly in time with her rhythm, until she grabbed his wrists and leaned forward to pin them to the mat. Her heavy kiss muffled his moan, and she tightened her thighs around his hips and kept on holding him down. When her fingers slipped between his, linking their hands, she drew back and rose up again.

She steadied herself with her palms on his chest and rode him hard, losing herself in the sensation. When Raubahn shifted his hips as she pushed up, her body jerked, and her voice cut through the air with something that was half a gasp and half a moan; he drew that sound out again, pleasure rippling through her in waves.

That was when he pushed himself up so that he was almost sitting, one hand coming to Morgana’s lower back to hold her close as he stole a kiss from her lips and rocked along with her quickening pace. She hadn’t expected—or wanted—the closeness, but now she wrapped an arm around his shoulders and her chest brushed against his and—gods, she only needed a little more. 

Morgana brought her other hand down to where they were connected, feeling him move in and out of her against the tips of her fingers as she rubbed tight circles over herself, familiar and sure, building up until all her pleasure crashed over her—and she moaned and dug her nails into Raubahn’s shoulder as she let the tide wash over her, jerking and clenching around him. He groaned against her throat.

“Morgana,” he breathed, taut, as her rocking slowed. His fingers tapped twice against the side of her thigh—surrender. 

She lifted herself up shakily and reached back, fingers touching his wrist as he quickly finished himself off, his moan muffled against her shoulder.

They fell still for a while, panting and trying to catch their breath, sweat cooling on their flushed skin. Morgana felt the echoes of her pleasure still coursing through her, slow and tingling—it was a pleasant enough sensation, but she was wearier than she’d expected, and she was now simply aching all over.

She considered kissing Raubahn again, didn’t, and readjusted her trousers as she pushed herself up to stand. She was a wet mess, and she appreciated his courtesy of warning her before he could make it worse.

“Do you need a rag?” she asked.

“I’ll, ah, manage,” Raubahn said as he tucked himself back into his trousers.

Morgana didn’t look at him or linger long; the last time she had, she’d grown too fond, and ended up with a bastard in her belly for her trouble. She busied herself with getting the staves back with the rest of the training supplies as Raubahn got to his feet, just as worn in his every movement as she was. When Morgana glanced his way, he seemed to want to speak.

“Should have no problem sleeping now,” she said before he could.

Raubahn chuckled, weary and bashful. “Aye. It was a good fight.”

“It was,” Morgana agreed, soft enough to smile. She made no more ceremony of it, and went on her way back towards the barracks, putting a hand on a pillar to spin back around to face him again. “Maybe some other time I can let you have a chance at winning.”

They were too evenly matched, and they both know it; it never was about chances. It wasn’t about the fight, either, but the exchange—clearer in battle for the both of them than it could ever be in words. Still, Raubahn smirked; it was the last thing she saw before she showed him her back again.

“I’ll not let you get bored of me,” he said as she left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (remember to stay safe and don't do what you see in fantasyland fanfic gang, pulling out is not an effective method of birth control and does not protect against STIs!)


	4. Chapter 4

Morgana slammed her hand down on the table so hard that it rattled and shook the dice. “Bugger me to the seven bloody seas!”

As though to taunt her, the pale die—the one that looked like whitewashed bone, the greatest pain in her arse—tumbled off the edge and fell to the floor on the exact number she had needed to win.

“Has anyone checked whether she’s got a knife?” someone asked from behind, through the drunken gathering of gladiators watching the game and waiting for their turn.

Before she could think that that was a splendid idea, the brute force of Gotwin’s arms wrapped around her middle and dragged her up from the box upon which she sat as though she weighed nothing—and she was pound upon pound of drunken muscle. 

“Come on, now, Mora. Time for a bit of water, hey?”

“I ain’t paying you a single gil,” Morgana shouted over her brother’s shoulder as he steered her away from the table, “you mousy little shite!”

Gotwin patted the side of her head. “All right, all right; ‘s’all just dice. Keep that anger for the sands.”

In one last act of petty frustration, Morgana stiffened her body and clenched her fists before slumping like a ragdoll. Gotwin laughed quietly and set her down. Morgana hadn’t drunk so much that it changed her speech or made it hard to stand, but it slowed her senses enough that she didn’t see the oncoming blow when she turned to face her brother: he flicked her nose the way he did when they were children. She grimaced and swatted at his hand.

“Stop antagonizing everyone here. We have children to feed and it won’t help us if the whole barracks hate us.”

Morgana’s already foul mood soured even further. “Children,” she scoffed, shoving a hand without much force against Gotwin’s chest and lifting the other to her forehead. “A child, you mean.”

“Mora—”

“No. Let’s not. I hear you, loud and clear. I’ll endeavour to make friends,” she said, like chewing up a particularly bitter plant.

Gotwin crossed one arm over his chest and scratched the thumb of his other hand under his chin, considering; he had an air she didn’t trust. “And here I thought riding the Bull was making you—well, I wouldn’t dare use the word ‘happy.’ Less prone to bouts of unsanctioned violence?”

Morgana's fist connected with Gotwin’s shoulder harder and quicker than she could think to deny it. “Don’t you ever say those words to me again,” she said as he rubbed his shoulder. Then she stopped, took a breath, and didn’t look him in the eye. “How did you bloody know?”

“Maybe I’m a fate-walker. You don’t know.”

“You’re too thick to be a fate-walker.”

“Well, now you’ve hurt my feelings,” Gotwin said, then smiled as he nudged her shoulder. “Look—I only want to know that my little sister is doing all right. This happening for the right reasons?”

“The right reasons?” Morgana asked, grimacing; trying to keep her temper from jumping straight to insult. Usually, it was easier with Gotwin than most, but tonight everything gnawed at her. “I’ll thank you to stay worried about the things that do concern you. Gods, really—we have no home, the woman I loved is living under the fucking imperials’ heel and I’ve no way of knowing whether she’s dead or suffering, and my son is being raised in the forest by strangers. Should I be singing and dancing just because of cock?”

Gotwin coughed awkwardly, his gaze catching on something behind Morgana and growing uncharacteristically furtive. “You’re right; things are… difficult. I’m sorry. I, ah—I should go check on Mathias.”

It wasn’t like her brother to try and shuffle away, but the way he raised his hand, only half-up in a cursory greeting, gave her a fair idea of the source of Gotwin’s discomfort even before she turned and saw Raubahn. She didn’t know how to read his expression—amused? curious? offended?

No. He wasn’t the type. And neither was Morgana the sort to play coy, to ask how much he’d heard and try to make her words less crude; especially not when she’d drunk enough to give even less of a damn than she usually did.

“It’s good cock, for what it’s worth. And everything else,” Morgana said, flat but genuine.

It made Raubahn laugh: that low, rumbling chuckle of his that she was finding she enjoyed more every time she heard it. “I am glad to hear that I please.”

Morgana smirked and began to walk alongside Raubahn, slowly and aimlessly, away from the common room; the rowdy revelry growing more distant with every step felt like a blessing, as did the cool breeze blowing in from outside.

“Not gambling with everyone else?” she asked.

“I won enough for tonight. I like to step away while the winds still blow in my favour.”

“Twelve, I wish I could say the same. About a lot more than dice, too,” Morgana said unenthusiastically. 

They ambled towards the training grounds without even noticing where their feet took them—somewhere they both felt a bit more right. Morgana leaned her shoulder against a pillar and crossed her arms, and Raubahn stood with his back against it next to her. “Did you have a woman, back home?” she asked. “Children?”

Raubahn shook his head. “No time for anything that lasted; not with the fighting. Between the mad king and the imperials, I never settled anywhere long enough after I left home.”

“Where?”

“Coldhearth,” Raubahn said, and Morgana gave a few slow nods. She saw the distance in his eyes, the pull of memory, of three words she didn’t hear—_liberty or death_—and then he found her again. “You had a woman and a child back home?”

Morgana forced her jaw not to tense. “A woman, aye. She stayed behind for her parents. I haven’t the faintest idea whether any of them is still alive, naturally,” she said, sighing. “But my son was born on this side of the Wall. He’s only seen a few moons.”

“Congratulations,” said Raubahn kindly.

“There’s not a day that I don’t regret bringing him into this world,” Morgana said like cold steel, the words coming unguarded. “I still think, some days, that I should have gotten rid of him while it was still time, but I couldn’t do it to his father. Kind man. Better father than I am a mother.”

Raubahn said nothing—without the dulling of the alcohol in her veins, she might have actually found some concern as to whether he reserved some judgement for her, but he was silent to listen. Half-drunk, she understood that.

“He’s Elezen, my boy’s father. I’m—I think I’m afraid that Ala Mhigo will mean nothing to him,” Morgana said, all in one breath. She felt like she was drowning in her own blood as she turned her head and looked at Raubahn. “Not the imperials’, or the mad king’s—_our_ Ala Mhigo.”

“It is our duty, no? To keep it alive until we can set it free.”

Morgana breathed in once, then out. When they had first come to Ul’dah, she could almost fool herself into thinking that the cooling rock and sand in the evening air smelled the same as it did in the Lochs, but it faded away a little more with every passing day. Now, all she could taste was dust.

“I don’t think it exists anymore.” Morgana sniffed, then made to turn away. “Anyroad, you didn’t have to listen to me whinge. We all have better to do.”

Raubahn caught her wrist, his grip loose enough that she only needed slip her hand out to break free. She only stopped and looked down at his fingers, thick and strong and scarred. A hundred fights, a hundred battles, and there would always be more. 

“Would you rather we remain strangers?” he asked. “I want to know you. We have all lost too much not to gain something here.”

Morgana kept her gaze down as she shifted her hand to touch her fingertips to the inside of Raubahn’s wrist, and he let go; she trailed her fingers down into his palm and released her grip on her own guard. When next she let herself be tangled up in his arms, Raubahn kissed the scars on her belly as though she had taken them in battle—understanding that it was a battle all on its own.


	5. Chapter 5

Morgana did not like to be cornered, and even as a gladiator, she did not like games; not when she felt she was more a piece than a player. She also knew that any man who hid in hoods and shadows were not the sort with whom she would do business—but this was not business. It was, after all, a game.

The rules were that the pieces were not to think too strongly on the blades that gleamed at their backs. That they were to face forward, towards the wall of the dead end in that dirty alley near Pearl Lane—and not to think, either, of the blood they might have to shed if they touched their own swords. The rules were what the hooded man conjured out of thin air, weaved out of nothing but words. For now, Morgana decided to obey the rules, but it did not stop her skin from pricking, her senses to feel like a sharp edge cutting against the bonds of sense.

And Gotwin—Gotwin was so calm he seemed to be standing before a stall at market to haggle with the fishmonger. No—calmer by far; back home, haggling was a serious and fierce affair.

“My friends have taken quite a liking to you on the bloodsands,” said the hooded man after dispensing with the understatements that he only wanted to talk and that this was simply good business. He twirled a dagger in his hands, pressing the point against the pad of his forefinger so that it dipped into the flesh without piercing it. “The bravery. The ferocity. The, well, beauty—a little something for all inclinations, eh?”

Morgana bit down hard into her cheek; she’d heard some of the stories. Gladiators in the beds of the rich of powerful. Handsome rewards, surely enough, but not the sort of arrangement that could be broken after agreeing even only the once.

“You and your friends may gaze upon us as much as you’d like,” Gotwin said evenly, then, more pointed: “on the sands.”

“Ah, of course! And that, yes, that, we shall. We’re all quite excited for the next real bout, aren’t we, lads?” the hooded man asked the thugs behind Gotwin and Morgana, drawing their assent. “Only two more nights of waiting, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Waiting for what, exactly?” Morgana asked, too sharp. “For us to lose on purpose so that your ‘friends’ can win their bets, or else you start breaking fingers?”

The hooded man laughed an absurdly enthusiastic laugh that bounced off the stones of the alley. “Oh, no. No! Quite the opposite, of course; why would we ask you to lose when you give such a show? Thal’s balls! That would be a waste.”

Morgana glanced furtively at her brother; the wariness she saw in his eyes was the same she felt. “Out with it,” she said.

“So you want us to win?” Gotwin said.

“Precisely,” the hooded man said, snapping his fingers and pointing to Gotwin in the same motion. From inside his robes, he produced a fat-bellied pouch, heavy and clinking with coins as he held it gingerly in his palm. “It’s quite the fight, you see, the Griffin’s Claws butting heads with the Bull of Ala Mhigo.”

“Like two wild dogs from the same pack tearing at each other’s throats,” said one of the thugs—the one behind Morgana. Not two summers past, she might have tried her chance with breaking his foot; now, she did not move a muscle, taking the blow.

“Ha! Well said, my lad.”

“So it’s two against one,” Gotwin said. “We’re confident in our chances.”

“Quite. However, you see, there is a… well, calling it a complication makes it seem so unpleasant, you see. A mere bump in the road. This Bull—your rival, I’m sure—has been making quite the stir since he arrival. A great and inspiring start, coming in chains and fighting his way to freedom out of his own execution; depending how you look at it. But my friends, they look at it rather from the side of all the losses his triumphs have been causing. It’s not a fight to the death, this bout, is it?”

“Guildmaster wouldn’t risk some of his best gladiators on a weekly match,” Gotwin said. His calm was beginning to fray; Morgana could hear it in his voice, in the tension with which he spoke.

The hooded man clicked his tongue almost mournfully. “But it is quite an unfortunate profession, is it not? Even in fights that are not meant to lead to death. Swords are oh-so-dangerous. Injuries catch.”

Shaking his head, the hooded man opened the purse and showed Gotwin and Morgana its contents: a pile of gleaming coins with, sitting atop it like a crown, a small phial filled with clear liquid. Something flipped inside Morgana at the sight; for good or for ill, she did not know.

“You need not count for yourselves: there is enough to house and feed sweet, young Mathias for, oh, nigh on a year. In better conditions than that gaol of a gladiator barracks, that is for certain.”

Morgana took a step forward, stopped only by her brother’s outstretched arm. “Keep his name out of your filthy mouth.”

“I did not mean to offend,” said the hooded man, raising a hand. “Merely to place an offer. You take this purse—let us call it your advance winnings—and use the little bottle as you see fit. It’s so versatile; genius work. Coats a blade nicely, or causes muscle weakness when ingested. Use your creativity! So long as the Bull, ah, loses quite squarely.”

Silence was all that met his words, and then Gotwin and Morgana both spoke at the same time:

“Or what?” asked Gotwin.

“And then?” asked Morgana.

She gritted her teeth and kept her eyes ahead rather than face the weight of the shocked look Gotwin tossed her way, holding the hooded man’s gaze even though she couldn’t see it. In the shadows, she could see his smirk crack through the veil of secrecy as the purse disappeared from his hand with a flick of his wrist.

“And then it is done, you already have your coin, and we never have to speak to each other again. Simple, no?” The hooded man spread his hands, the palm of his empty hand held outward. It might have been more of a peaceable gesture, if not for the dagger he still held between his fingers. “We have come to do business, not to make threats.”

“Where I come from, drawn swords are a threat,” Gotwin said icily.

“This is not Ala Mhigo,” the hooded man said. “This is Ul’dah, a nation of honest word and prosperity. My lads protect me on behalf of my friends; nothing more, and nothing less. If I were to make threats, I would speak them.”

Morgana could not stop her eyes from searching for the purse. Something inside her was recoiling, so violently it seemed like a serpent’s bite spreading poison through her veins, but she had been a sellsword long before she ever became a gladiator. A sellsword knew to behead those doubts swiftly and permanently. Knew to listen to the loudest surety—and in this world broken by the imperials, she only let herself look upon one path.

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll do it.”

“Morgana,” Gotwin hissed. “What has gotten into you?”

“I’m thinking of our family. _Your_ son,” she hissed back.

The disdainful way with which her brother shook his head at her said more than words ever could. Watching Gotwin’s silent disagreement and the way Morgana stiffened, the hooded man clicked his tongue as though out of some misguided sense of pity.

“If I may—” he began loftily.

Gotwin cut in, his voice sharper than every blade between them. “You may not,” he said, taking hold of Morgana’s arm before she could think to reach for the pouch. “We will have nothing to do with this; find yourself another assassin. We are _going_.”

With that, Gotwin turned. His fingers found the hilt of his sword again, and he placed himself so that he and Morgana stood back to back, the way they so often did in the arena. Had she been more enthusiastic about their escape from the situation, she might have liked their chances; as it was, she thought her brother a noble fool.

“Now would be the time to make your threats with those pretty words of yours or let us be on our way,” Gotwin said to the hooded man without looking back. His voice was a rock, utterly immovable.

Morgana could only watch the hooded man and ready a riposte. With blades at their backs, disagreements—no matter how dire—always became secondary. Under her unforgiving gaze, the hooded man merely raised a hand to rub his jaw, lips pulled taut, and heaved a sigh.

“I cannot say I am without disappointment,” he said in that pale, milky voice of his, only thick with dishonesty, “but I have no threats to make. You are, of course, free to go.”

The thugs lowered their blades with the efficiency of automatons, and Gotwin reached a hand out to take Morgana’s wrist and guide her along with him so that she did not have to turn and show her back to the hooded man and his swordsmen until they were well out of reach. They picked up the pace and walked side by side, then, but they did not stop, and the breath did not seem to return to Morgana’s lungs until they were outside the city walls.

With that breath, she spat, “What in the seven hells is the matter with you?”

“With me?” Gotwin thundered back, his voice high on the wind. “Have you gone completely mad? Have we so wholly lost ourselves that we must play butchers for some rich shite’s convenience?”

“We are sellswords, Gotwin, I’ll remind you.”

“I have not forgotten. Not the way you clearly have forgotten that we still adhered to some gods-damned principle. The same rule since we were not even _twenty_: no job that does not sit right with even one of us.”

“You’ve gone blind with righteousness if you think we can afford to spit on a way to keep Mathias safe and fed for a year,” Morgana snapped.

“He is my son! I will not have him fed with blood. Not like this; not in his name.” Gotwin shook his head, his anger and disgust so bright in his eyes he seemed animated by the Destroyer himself. Still, he took a breath, and stepped closer to Morgana in the sand. He was no softer, but his voice had quieted. “Do you think I don’t see the way you look at Raubahn? How he looks at you?”

Morgana’s blood went cold. “Is that what this is about? Some bloody _tryst_?”

“It is about everything,” Gotwin said, low. “My concerns do not begin or end with him, but I can’t ignore it, either. You and I, we—”

“I am _not_ weak,” Morgana said. She felt the rumble of her own voice low in her throat, raw with the disappointment of having to remind him, of all people.

“—swore to look after each other, and—” Gotwin’s voice trailed off, shock written into the lines of his face. His shifted a hundred ways in the space of a moment, through years and seasons, before it settled on understanding. “Mora. Caring for someone who isn’t your blood isn’t weakness.”

Morgana could only speak the way she lifted her shield to block the force of a blow. “It is a waste,” she said stiffly. “And we are fools if we let anyone get in the way of doing what is best for our family.”

“What is best for our family,” Gotwin began, breathing through his nose between the words as his anger took on an exasperated shape, the tension unyielding, “is that my son does not carry a legacy of cowardice and cruelty. I will endure every indignity the Coliseum holds for us, but I will not sully the name I’ve given him by stabbing a brother in the back for coin.”

He made to turn away, thinking he finally had the last word, but Morgana had never been content to let him have it. 

“They only need one of us to agree. I don’t need your help to slay a bull,” she said coldly.

Gotwin turned towards her, his eyes no longer a fury. All Morgana could see as he stepped close to her was disappointment and disdain; both cut deeper than a rage she could meet. His anger, she knew: for nearly a quarter of a century, through the days of peace and storms, she had coaxed it out of him, quelled it, matched and outmatched it. But this—seeing him look at her as though she were lesser by her own design, no longer his equal—she knew not how to endure.

“Mark me, sister—” he never called her sister; Mora, Mo, bo-turd, but never _sister,_ “if you go through with this, you will lose this family. May these cursed fucking sands be my witness.”

Gotwin ground his foot in the sand, making a trace in the ever-shifting soil of Thanalan; it would fade away, covered by the wind and dust in due time, but the scraping sound of it seemed to have been made to last in Morgana’s ear. She could almost taste the salty air of the Lochs on her tongue, fresh against the way the desert winds burned in her nose. Her brother said nothing else; he simply walked away, back towards the city gates, his shoulders taut and his fists still clenched. Morgana’s own fists were curled tight, so badly that even her short nails dug half-moons into the flesh of her palms.

She stood shaking in the desert for a long while—as though her body knew that, within a matter of days, she would be kneeling in these very sands again, cradling Gotwin’s corpse in her arms as the jagged slash in his throat wept crimson.

*******

“I’m glad he’s alive,” Gotwin had said the morning after their bout, smiling with relief even as he rolled his bruised shoulder gingerly. “Even if he thrashed us.”

“He shouldn’t have been able to,” Morgana had said. It was easy, how things always mended between them, as though it were Havisa’s magic knitting them back together like broken skin. It had always been so. After everything, Morgana had moved on to sullenness. “Two of us and one of him. And I know all his tells.”

“Like he knows all of yours?” Havisa had teased.

They hadn’t spoken of the hooded man’s offer; not the three of them together. Surely Gotwin had kept no part of it from his wife as he always did, but Havisa hadn’t let it change her demeanour. She had met Morgana with grace even in the aftermath, and sometimes that grace involved beaming as her sister-in-law snapped a bloodstained rag in her general vicinity.

“I don’t tumble like I fight,” Morgana had said, inaccurately.

“Regardless. You were fractured, you two. Could see that well enough. Any wall breaks easier when it is already cracked.”

Morgana had sighed. “How is it that someone as thick as you married someone as wise as her?” she’d asked Gotwin, and Havisa had blown her a kiss.

Now, Havisa’s hand was clutched in hers so tightly that the metal of her wedding band dug into Morgana’s very bones, and the absence of her smile left her face empty and ashen with loss. They moved as specters through the empty hallways of the barracks, without shape and without colour, death clinging to them and to their silent footsteps. 

It was like fleeing Ala Mhigo without the burning, without the screaming, without the violence; all of it was contained to the arena, where the ringing of blades was buried under the weight of hundreds of empty cheers. Hundreds of discordant voices calling for fabricated chaos.

Morgana had not understood quickly enough that it was the fabrication that was the deadliest—deadly, and unfeeling, and greedy enough to claim the life of a man who had survived too much to die like a beast. Everything was too empty without Gotwin, too stark. She walked with a hand on the hilt of her dagger because every part of her rejected that void, knew that something would fill it—and if it wasn’t Gotwin, it would be something to cut down in his stead. To protect his family. 

The quickest way was far from the arena, through the hallways at the edges that lay open at the sides to let the air in. Familiar paths twisted so in this new realm for her to inhabit that they had become unrecognizable, their shadows spreading further, the low moon shining pale as a sickness on the stone floor. Morgana should have known to see the training grounds with the eyes that had guided her to them so many times, should have known that this place would not be empty—that they were as haunted as Morgana felt.

The Bull of Ala Mhigo was meant to be nursing the trifling wounds he’d suffered against the Griffin’s Talons, but that did not mean there was no fight in him. He was alive, and so it burned within him, a flame that could dim but never fade. Alive. The very sight of him leaving the training grounds made Morgana’s blood boil, when she realized that it was Raubahn and not some shade of an assassin; by then, she already had him pinned to a pillar, her forearm like a metal bar across his shoulders as the point of her knife touched his throat.

Her blood boiled, but she barely felt it. She was cold all over.

“Morgana,” Raubahn said gently. Even in the dark, he saw the smear of blood on her cheek—she’d pressed her forehead to Gotwin’s, touched his throat, stained her fingers with his blood—and Havisa’s haggard visage, Mathias asleep in his mother’s arms with his cheek pressed against her shoulder. “What’s happened?”

Morgana wanted to growl and bite and scream her throat raw, but it was Havisa who spoke. “They killed him. They killed Gotwin,” she said, not meeting Raubahn’s gaze.

His shock shifted quickly into a frown, deep with anger. “Who?”

“The ones who want you dead,” Morgana said through gritted teeth, pressing harder against his shoulders. Twelve, she wanted to draw blood. “He denied them. _You_ denied them. And now they’ve slit his throat to make him pay for it.”

“Morgana, I—”

“Do not say my name. Don’t say a fucking word.”

“Don’t go,” Raubahn said, fierce even when he was quiet. “Don’t leave it like this. We’ll fight—we’ll fight them together, and they will answer for Gotwin’s life with blood—”

Morgana’s anger echoed on the stone. “If I stay, one of us dies!” Her fingers curled in the fabric of Raubahn’s tunic, clenching tight. She looked into his eyes and spoke: low, this time, and cold. “I would have done it without a second thought. I would kill you a hundred times if it meant my family could be whole.”

She almost jumped when Havisa’s hand touched her arm, gently pulling her back. “Mora, please,” she said quietly. Morgana didn’t know whether it was urgency or kindness for their countryman; when Havisa looked at Raubahn, her expression was unchanged. “She took his remains to a man named Osferth in Little Ala Mhigo, for safeguarding. If you would—”

“I’ll see to it that his last rites are taken care of with dignity; I swear it,” Raubahn said gravely. His gaze shifted from Havisa to Morgana, always drawn to her even in anger and grief. “Where will you go?”

“Where we’ll be safe,” Morgana said. The gods still had many a lesson for her—the next that nowhere was safe, and especially not the Shroud. Not for them.

She reserved no more farewells for Raubahn, her only goodbye the lowering of her blade. Still, he reached for her, and the point of her dagger was at his ribs. 

“Watch your back, Aldynn. Stop making yourself weak. They won’t stop until they have a dead bull and my brother will have died for nothing.”

A great many deaths were for nothing. There would be no meaning in Havisa’s, either, and in what Morgana would believe was Mathias’.

The only meaning was for the living to find, and Morgana and Raubahn lived.


	6. after the wall

“One of your men addressed me as ‘Captain,’” said Morgana, forgoing the effort of a prior greeting.

Raubahn paused with his hand still in the bowl of water on the table before him, droplets of water falling silently from his chin. He looked at Morgana, straightened, and shook his hand out.

“I was told you’re a unit captain,” he pointed out.

“Aye, I _was._ But there’s no unit left. I was standing at their last rites—half of them without a corpse to recover—when it happened,” she said, then pushed out a bitter sigh as she realized that she sounded like she’d only come to complain. “I didn’t know the Immortal Flames of Ul’dah,” (and here Raubahn could only shake his head at her mockingly lofty tone, strangely fond), “recognized the ranks of the Ala Mhigan Resistance.”

“The Ala Mhigan Brigade does,” Raubahn said. 

That gave Morgana pause. “Oh.”

Even after twenty years, Raubahn looked at Morgana as though it were still habit giving him the expectant look on his face, as though he knew something else was coming. “So?” he asked after a moment. “Shall I tell my men _not_ to show respect for your position?”

Morgana sighed again. “No,” she said, and moved closer—Twelve, she hated the sound of footsteps in the castrum; metal, always so cold, so high, the same way it had resonated when they were dozens running through Baelsar’s Wall—to splash her own face with water, dragging a hand down over her eyes and mouth. “I wanted to thank you. For letting us honour our dead our way.”

“I insisted.”

The ripples in the water distorted her reflection, but Morgana was still startled to realize, as she looked down, that she looked like half a corpse herself. She set both hands down on the table and bowed her head.

“I really thought the Alliance had come to put those of us the imperials or Ilberd didn’t finish off in chains,” she said, wiping the water from her nose as she looked back at Raubahn. Suddenly, standing still and empty-handed seemed like an imprisonment in itself. “Still find myself thinking maybe you ought to.”

This time, Raubahn’s silence wasn’t one of waiting for her to speak; neither was he meeting her hard edges with a smile. His usual gravity was tempered in something else, something that seemed to make his frown pull at the scars on his face; when he spoke, she realized it was the harshness of his own ghosts.

“Would it make you stomach any of it better if you were in chains?” he asked. “The guilt? The betrayal? The pain of knowing you’ve failed those you love?”

Morgana wanted to say yes, but the words wouldn’t come.

“It does not,” Raubahn said. “It makes the shame no less heavy to bear.”

His face was a silent storm, dark with a memory that was still too familiar, too fresh. In the quiet that fell from his words, Morgana’s eyes drifted down: down to his neck, to scars she didn’t know, so strikingly similar to her own; to his left shoulder, uncovered by the black cloak which now lay draped over the back of a nearby chair. His gaze followed hers, but he said nothing.

“Ilberd was a bloody fool,” Morgana said stiffly. “Rip off a bull’s horn, and he may well gore you with the other.”

Raubahn managed a small smirk and an exhale, scraping the palm of his hand against the stubble at his jaw. “Would you believe me if I told you I’d come to hope I would not have to face him in battle again?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Morgana said. She moved closer to him and raised a hand—not to what remained of his left arm, but to his throat, fingers barely touching the old scars that, to her, were new. “Neither would I understand it.”

“Had it come to it, one of us would have died.” He held her stare, looking for familiarity, for understanding. “I did not wish to be the one to end his life.”

“You got your wish.”

“Some wish,” Raubahn said with a bittersweet smile, laying his hand over hers at his throat. When her gaze dropped, he bowed his head and touched his brow to hers.

They stood this way for long minutes, perhaps, or a mere few heartbeats. Morgana knew only that she was breathing, even though her lungs still seemed to fill with nothing true; that he touched her skin even when it seemed only like wind. She tilted up her chin and kissed him, and he wound his arm around her waist—and she felt not even half-whole, but at least she felt something that was not a bone-deep ache.


	7. Chapter 7

When they lay together—in those rare moments of peace that could be afforded in the routine chaos of Castrum Oriens—Morgana kept to Raubahn’s right side. She let him trail absentminded fingers up and down her spine, along scars both old and new; he had a favourite, she noticed, one that he always stroked even more slowly and delicately.

“I remember this one,” he said as Morgana lay on her front with her arms curled under the thin pillow of his cot. As general of the Immortal Flames, he had some privacy and comforts, but she still found it a minor miracle that they both could fit without being stacked on top of each other.

“You do?”

He spoke of the past because he understood that it stung less than the present. She still ached, bitterly so, but the old loss that she’d survived was more bearable than the sheer emptiness of looking upon Baelsar’s Wall and wondering how her only son’s blood had fed the primal born within those hard planes of steel.

“On the bloodsands. I was watching before my own bout; you miscalculated the reach of a woman half your size and took the tip of her spear, right there. Barely flinched.”

Morgana searched those distant memories, every night under the lights hazy but for a few. She could still remember the dark wormways under the arena, dark but for the drab afternoon light seeping in, the way they had looked on the day her brother had sealed his own fate.

“It was Gotwin,” she said after a moment, her voice strangely disconnected from the memory as it slowly returned to her. “He misjudged her reach and didn’t block when I expected him to. His wife gave him an earful about it while she was stitching me up.” She tilted her chin up on the pillow to look at Raubahn, frowning. “That was twenty years ago.”

That they should be able to even say those words was a blessing in itself. Twenty years of surviving every struggle, every indignity, every horror the fates thought to toss their way; there was beauty in that, in the new and myriad scars marring Raubahn’s hardened face. In him, she could see it, but in herself, it only felt hateful. Knowing that he remembered her in a time before the years had chipped most of her away embedded a deep sense of unease into her bones.

“Memory acts strangely,” Raubahn said, tracing his fingers down her spine. “I can scarcely remember my own mother’s face, but I still see you through the gate that night with the utmost clarity. I lost my bout right after.”

Morgana snorted weakly. “Because of me? Having a woman made you soft.”

“I was nursing an injury, if I’m not mistaken,” Raubahn said, mockingly defensive. When she said nothing, he slipped into a moment of thoughtful silence, then said: “Do you really still believe that attachment was a weakness?”

“Everything can be a weakness as much as strength. It’s in the clarity that it changes," Morgana said numbly. “If my brother had valued his attachment to his family over his precious morals, he might still be alive today, a father to his son and a husband to a living wife.”

Raubahn’s hand stilled on her back. “And I would be long dead,” he said, more of an observation than a judgement. Morgana only shrugged.

“You might have survived us. You survived everything else. I know they would not have stopped wanting you dead just because they’d gotten to slit my brother’s throat.”

The door to Raubahn’s quarters nearly shook from the urgency with which someone pounded its other side. “General,” said a muffled voice. Morgana rolled off the bed and began searching for her shirt—far harder to find than her sword belt among the mess of hers and Raubahn’s clothing and armour. “The Warrior of Light and the Scions have come.”

“Thank you. Tell them I will meet with them right away.”

Morgana raised her eyebrows at him as she waited for the footsteps to have receded to speak. “Making the Warrior of Light wait because you couldn’t keep your trousers on. Really. You’ve gotten sloppy in your advanced age.”

“I don’t wear trousers,” Raubahn said as he swung his legs over the cot and bent to pick up his tunic in one fluid motion.

Morgana was the first gust of wind to sweep out under the bright sky of East End, and Raubahn the second, taking his place at the war table with the other gathered Alliance commanders. The garish sunlight blinded Morgana, and it wasn’t only the result of being confined within the imperials’ cold steel walls; everything was too bright now, almost unbearably so. She already felt like half a corpse, some cursed spirit of resilience that wandered Castrum Oriens because the fates had bound her to it.

A part of her wanted to leave—perhaps she could find meaning in the fight again if she wandered out onto the lands to which her blood was bound. The members of the Resistance who had crossed over from Thanalan after the Griffin’s disaster were already moving back and forth to Rhalgr’s Reach, more familiar by the day; the Flames’ Ala Mhigan Brigade was moving with a vigour that, by Raubahn’s own admission, had never animated them before they had been able to return home. It could be so easy, not to be a ghost, but Morgana woke every night thinking that a blade was lodged between her ribs, as though telling her she had no place left in this life.

She was not the first to have lost; every Ala Mhigan fought because they had. Blood kin, lovers, friends, homes. They all went on living for the dead, but her loss tethered her to this place, to this empty in-between that stood with her old home on one side, occupied and bled dry, and the forest that had given her only child his first breaths, seen his first steps—the in-between where she could only believe he had breathed his last.

Nineteen years without him. Nineteen years without Gotwin, without Havisa, without Mathias. Could she live nineteen more, now that she had had her son within reach only to have him torn away so quickly? She had barely survived losing her family; now, without Sairsel, she thought that perhaps the fates had finally broken her—every piece scattered to Thanalan, to the Black Shroud, to the Fringes.

The worst of it was that she could not blame him the way she had blamed Gotwin; only herself. She had wanted to see Sairsel strong, to know that he could survive the Empire if he was truly so devoted to seeing Ala Mhigo back into the hands of their people. She had traced a bloody road for him in following the Griffin, foolish as she had been to believe in that man, and of course he had walked upon it—not because he was blind, but because she had been.

And now he was gone and there was nothing left of him but for a primal lost somewhere in Gyr Abania, made real by the suffering of hundreds like him.

He’d loved days like these: bright, with the sun golden in the trees and a quiet breeze that made the leaves sing. When Morgana thought it, she did not even ache. She only felt that emptiness, gnawing, filling her with a screaming void she only knew to quiet in those stolen moments with a man who, some twenty years ago, had felt her equal in battle and in loss.

She barely even had it in herself to want blood, the way she had then.

Then she heard his voice.

As quiet as that flutter of leaves, the way the wind whispered through life-filled branches—his laughter, of all things, weary but _alive_. She thought she was going mad until she ran forward and saw him among a handful of others, stiff under their grateful touches, leaning into the press of Leofric Snakesbane’s brow against his. She saw nothing else but him.

“Sairsel,” she breathed, the word burning on her tongue.

“Mother.”

He spoke so softly she barely heard him, his expression heavy with a hundred emotions that weighed upon her just the same, and reached for her as she did him. When she pulled her son into her arms, Morgana felt a quaking sob climb up her lungs, holding him so tightly she could feel his breath, too, shuddering as he buried his face in the crook of her neck.

“You’re alive,” she barely heard herself saying. It was strange, how long it took for her to realize that she was weeping. “Oh, my boy, you’re—you’re alive.”

Sairsel almost laughed. “Barely,” he said, sniffling.

She pulled away, taking his face between her hands—and she saw not Nimaurel in the dark evergreen of his eyes or the hawklike elegance of his nose, not Gotwin in the set of his jaw or his frowning mouth, but _Sairsel._ Her son. As she looked into his eyes, she smiled and pressed her forehead to his, stroking his cheeks with her thumbs. He lay a hand over hers, old scars on his palms of which she knew too little hidden away under scraps of fabric and leather.

When she drew him into another sharp embrace, Sairsel flinched.

“Are you all right?”

“Getting better,” Sairsel said, fingers against his chest as he pulled away. He tugged at his scarf, at the laces of his shirt, and showed her a few inches of his bare chest: sun-kissed brown struck through by a thin, ragged line just shades paler than angry red. Morgana’s fingers tightened around the hilt of her sword as though it were an anchor, but Sairsel had only a weary smile for her. “Ilberd’s parting gift to me. I suppose the Griffin we knew had claws of his own, too.”

Morgana put a hand on his shoulder rather than touch the scar, her thumb against the side of his neck; she could almost feel his pulse. “You found out who he was?”

“When you sent me to him. I heard you say his name,” Sairsel said softly. “I was angry; wanted him to pay for my friend. So I fought him—tried to, at least.”

“Oh, you foolish boy,” Morgana whispered, briefly closing her eyes.

“I know. I don’t think I would be alive if not for her.” Sairsel glanced over to the Warrior of Light, her tall, glorious frame gleaming in her armour. The title suited her perfectly. “She carried me out, did what she could to heal me. I think some of the Scions helped, but I wasn’t—I don’t remember everything.”

“You were with the Scions?” Morgana asked, eyebrows high. “All this time?”

“At first. Ahtynwyb took me back to the Sandsea.”

To little Ashelia Riot, the girl who played mother to her son. In another life, she could have been her daughter—resilient and willful and brave. Kinder than Morgana herself was; kinder than Little Ala Mhigo, than her own mother, and her father’s absence could have made her. With that kindness, she cared for those who meant something to her. For Sairsel.

Morgana had to speak as though around glass. “She kept you safe?”

“Aye,” Sairsel said, nodding. “Safe so that I could come here and fight. If they’ll still have me.”

Nothing needed to be said; Morgana did not need to tell him that the fight would always have someone like him. More blood, more swords, more bodies. She could still believe in it—could believe in it again—so she put a hand up between his shoulders and guided him forward, past Liberty Gate. They stepped onto proper Gyr Abanian soil together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading! ❤ drop me a line if you'd like, and you can also find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/vulpinewood) for shitposting and memes while i'm deep in eorzea again.
> 
> (originally posted on [tumblr](https://farplane.tumblr.com/post/187892884443/liberty-or-death).)


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